7 Instagram Metrics Every Business Must Monitor Regularly

Instagram metrics enable you to monitor the performance of your marketing campaigns, analyze what’s working and what isn’t, so you can quickly optimize your strategy and grow your audience.

With more than 700 millions users, Instagram is one of the most influential marketing audiences in the world. However, unless you analyze the performance of your Instagram marketing strategy, you won’t know if it’s working out or not. Here are 7 Instagram metrics you can monitor regularly to help you track the performance of your Instagram marketing tactics, grow your audience, and engage them better.

7 Instagram Metrics to Track Regularly

Here are 7 Instagram metrics for businesses to monitor the performance of their Instagram marketing activities.

1. Growth Rate of Followers

Although it’s good to track the number of Instagram followers, it’s more important to track the growth in your number of Instagram followers. Follower Growth Rate is a key metric that indicates how your Instagram activities grow your followers. You can analyze how Follower Growth Rate rises or falls based on frequency of posts, quality of images, videos, and even your interactions with other users. You can also monitor how your Instagram promotions and ads impact the follower growth rate of your account.

For example, if you see a spike in your follower count last Monday, you can go back to your Instagram feed and see what you posted on that day. You can also track monthly growth rate in followers to see if they are in line with your Instagram marketing objectives. For example, if you have 520 followers on June 1, and 572 followers on July 1, the monthly growth rate of followers is (572 – 520 )/520 % = 10%

2. Engagement Rate

Once you have a reasonable number of Instagram followers, you can begin measuring what percent of your followers engage (using Instagram likes & comments ) with your posts. Here’s how to calculate Instagram engagement rate. For example, if you receive 115 likes and 5 comments in the month of July, for your account which has 600 followers at the time, then the Engagement rate is (115+5)/600 % = 20%

Engagement Rate helps you analyze how your content impacts audience engagement. Did you get a lot of comments because you posted questions in your description? Did they dip because your comments were quirky? You can calculate this Instagram metric every month, and see how it compares with last months’ value, or even the average engagement rate over the last 6 months.

Although both followers & non-followers can like & comment on your posts, engagement rate is a useful indicator of people engage with your Instagram content.

3. Engagement Per Post

Engagement Per Post is one of most common Instagram metrics that enables you to track the average engagement driven by your Instagram posts. For example, if you post 6 photos and they get a total of 115 likes and 5 comments, then your Engagement Per Post is (115+5)/6 = 20.

If your average engagement for these 6 posts is higher or lower than the overall average engagement, then it might be a good idea to analyze your posts to see what influenced the change.

5. Hashtag Growth

Hashtag Growth is another key Instagram metric that enables you to analyze how many posts contain your hashtags and how people are using it in their comments. It’s a great way to monitor your Instagram hashtag promotions. In addition to monitoring your branded hashtags (such as #juicelove), you should also monitor hashtags that use your brand name (e.g, #sujajuice). This is because even though you may be trying to push your branded hashtags, Instagram users tend to generate their own hashtags with your brand name. So monitor all the various hashtags that use your brand name, at least once a month, to see which ones are gaining traction so you can also start promoting them yourself.

6. Best Hashtags by Interaction

Does adding hashtags to your posts improve user engagement? If so, do you know which of your Instagram hashtags drive most likes and comments? It’s important to find the top performing hashtags by interaction, so you can create hashtag promotions for them, to grow your reach and engagement. You can use third party tools like AgoraPulse to track top hashtags for your Instagram account.

7. Growth of Competitors’ Hashtags

Just as you’re using branded hashtags, your competitors too must be using some hashtags to grow their audience. Check out their bios to find which hashtags they use to promote their business. Once you know which competitor hashtags to monitor, you can use a tool like Tagboard to track the number of posts gathered by each hashtag.

How to Monitor Instagram Analytics & Metrics?

Just like Facebook Insights, even Instagram provides free analytics, but only for its business accounts. It’s called Instagram Insights and allows you to monitor many useful metrics through Instagram App. Here are some of the metrics provided by Instagram Account Insights.

Overall Metrics

Impressions – Total number of views for your posts and stories

Reach – Number of unique accounts who viewed your posts & stories

Website Clicks – Number of clicks to links you’ve included in your business profile description

You’ll also see the following insights about your followers, including gender, age and location information.

For Each Post

Likes

Comments

Saved: The number of unique accounts that saved your post

Impressions: Total number of times your post was seen

Reach: Number of unique accounts who saw your post

Engagement – Total number of unique Instagram accounts that liked, commented on or saved your post

Video Views – Total number of times your video was viewed

For Each Stories

Impressions: Total number of times your story was seen

Reach: Number of unique accounts who saw your story

Replies: Number of times people send messages through the Send Message option on your story

Exits: The number of times someone swiped from one of your stories to someone else’s story, or returned to their Feed.

There are also plenty of social media analytics tools that allow you to connect your Instagram account and track key Instagram metrics using real-time online dashboards. In fact, you can even access them on mobile, and export these dashboards as social media reports which you can further share with your team and clients. Here are some of the social media analytics tools you can check out to monitor Instagram metrics:

It’s important to note that each of these social media analytics tools slices and dices data to generate tons of number and trends. However, not all their metrics and dashboards may be really important. While evaluating these social media analytics platforms, the key is to look for a social media analytics tool that helps you track the key Instagram metrics, that actually help you grow your business on Instagram.

No matter which tool you choose, ensure that you use it in conjunction with the free Instagram Account Insights.

Conclusion

Hopefully, these Instagram metrics will help you monitor your campaign performance and improve them quickly. Instagram Analytics can enable you to understand what type of posts drive most likes & comments, and which hashtags get maximum engagement so you can easily post content that generates maximum response. Tracking the right Instagram metrics can help you monitor the reach and engagement of your Instagram posts and enable you to optimize your Instagram strategy quickly.

About Sreeram Sreenivasan

Sreeram Sreenivasan has worked with various Fortune 500 Companies in areas of Business Growth, Sales & Marketing Strategy. He’s the Founder of Ubiq BI, a cloud-based BI Platform for SMBs & Enterprises.